Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness - Alexandra Fuller [60]
But my first consistent memory is of a farmhouse outside the small town of Karoi. “A lot of rooms strung together under a hot tin roof,” I say. “And wasn’t it flat and very dry, and the lawn was full of paper thorns?”
Mum puts down her teacup. “Well, yes. It wasn’t much of a house, but the farmer who owned the place was very kind and generous and he let us stay there rent free.” Mum gives me a look. “And he used to have terribly wild parties, something to do with blowing a feather across a sheet until all your clothes were off. We never understood it because we were very innocent, weren’t we Tim?”
“What’s that?” Dad says.
“INNOCENT,” Mum shouts, “WE WERE VERY INNOCENT.”
Dad lights his pipe. “Oh yes,” he says. “That’s right.” A cloud of smoke wraps around his head. “Absolutely.”
The three of us are sitting under the Tree of Forgetfulness on a Sunday afternoon one recent May, in what passes for autumn in the Zambezi Valley. I’ve chosen this time of year to travel from Wyoming to visit my parents because although it’s still hot, it’s not unbearably so. Between the extremes of the seasons (the earth neither flooded nor parched), their farm has taken on a genuinely bucolic air: geese and sheep cropping rhythmically around the fish ponds; an occasional cockerel from the nearby village hollering to his hens (the sound reminds me of childhood afternoons, waking up after a heat-drugged siesta); birds squabbling at the fruit feeder in Mum’s garden. “Look at that,” she says, “a black-collared barbet.” She cocks her head and talks to him, “Too-puddley, too-puddley, too-puddley, too-puddley. . . .”
And then, as if still addressing the bird, Mum returns to her memories, “Well, we never planned to stay in Karoi anyway. It was already too taken, too settled for us, wasn’t it, Tim? We wanted land that came with a swath of wilderness, somewhere a bit more out of the ordinary.” So on Sundays Dad brought the weekly newspaper home and my parents laid the classifieds out on the dining room table next to a map of Rhodesia and they searched for a farm the size and shape of the dream they had in their heads.
By 1930, all Rhodesia’s land had been officially apportioned by the colonial government. Unsurprisingly, designated European areas coincided roughly with the high-rainfall, fertile areas; Tribal Trust Lands lay more or less in the dry periphery; and the tiny allotment of Native Purchase Areas were farther away in the oppressively hot, tsetse-fly–prone zones. European settlers gave no sign that they considered their allotment as either immoral or dangerously unsustainable. For one thing, there was a very strong sense that God had given the settlers two holy thumbs-up (“Onward Christian Soldiers” was a popular enough hymn to wear out the relevant keys on Protestant church organs across the country). For another thing, many whites considered blacks so childishly inferior that taking their land was considered a justified occupation of virgin soil. “I don’t wish to be unkind,” Rhodesian prime minister Ian Smith said in 1970, “but sixty years ago Africans were uncivilized savages, walking around in their skins.”
Smith and his followers seemed determined to deny the country an African history prior to the arrival of Europeans. They rejected, for example, the evidence of what the Rhodesians called Zimbabwe Ruins, a complex of conical towers and massive stone walls in the southeastern part of the country concluded to be the royal enclosure of a medieval Shona empire. Undulating over eighteen hundred acres, it is the largest ancient structure south of the Sahara. Archaeological excavations uncovered shards of pottery from China, and Arabian beads pointing to an